Ecclesiastical Latin is a house of many mansions: in it are found the Latin of Jerome’s Bible and that of canon law, the Latin of the liturgy and of the scholastic philosophers, the Latin of Ambrosian hymns and papal bulls. The list may be extended. As a sure foundation for the study of any particular form of Latin used by the Church, this text concentrates on the language of the Vulgate Bible and that of such major liturgical texts as the Mass and the Exsultet. Since in the study of Biblical and liturgical Latin the student encounters every major grammatical structure, he will feel confident of his’ prepara- tion to read other kinds of ecclesiastical Latin.

The chief aim of this text is to give the student—within a year of study—the ability to read ecclesiastical Latin. Although Latin is no longer the universal language of the Church, it continues to shape our thinking about theological matters in the form of vocabulary drawn from Latin texts. Further, while the vernacular has perma- nently come in, it is still true that anyone wishing to study Augus- tine or Aquinas must know Latin.

Learning ecclesiastical Latin has two bonuses for the student. Re- cent studies have shown that the formal analysis of a highly struc- tured language such as Latin gives the student an improved under- standing of the purposes and possibilities of language and greatly advances his ability to write and speak effectively. For the student planning to study the Greek of the New Testament, Latin introduces him to a sister-language which shares many of the same methods of expression. Thus the study of ecclesiastical Latin, while an enjoy- able and profitable study in itself, looks back to the improvement of English and forward to the mastery of the original language of the Gospels.